The faded star-quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, over-the-hill at 40 and nursing a bad knee, considers retirement after an anonymous source disparages his season performances in print. Character rumination stacks the deck against our embittered hero: he's offered a management position with a computer firm and another job leasing cars (both offers are seen as dead-ends), while his unhappy wife is ready to walk out and a former teammate comes to him begging for a loan ($200!). Screenplay by David Moessinger is full of cynical one-liners substituting for insight into these unfulfilled people, while the football milieu is used mainly as a backdrop to the melodramatic action off the field. Charlton Heston is all wrong as an athlete--just because the man is tall and lean doesn't mean he's an ideal candidate for a football uniform. Heston is also unusually harsh with spouse Jessica Walter, who tired quickly of the Football Wives circle and now runs her own successful fashion business (Heston insults her creativity, equating it with an apparent inability to conceive a child; she slaps at him, he grabs her, and they end up making love). Director Tom Gries offers us only a flicker of insight into the world of professional football. He tries avoiding gridiron clichés, and his narrative timeline is interestingly woozy (mixing staccato flashbacks with bits of reality and, maybe, delusion), but the overall mood of the piece is unbelievably morose. Moessinger really does appear to believe that 40 means you're finished, washed-up. Heston may have felt there was something in the script he could play, something substantial and (atypical for the actor) not-heroic, but the picture isn't convincing. The foundation of the story--an aging man's fear that he's no longer useful after outgrowing his profession--is a good dramatic starting point for a character portrait (and still feels relatively fresh today), yet the writing is pretentious and dishonest. As to the downbeat finale, it underlines the pervading message that we're all "whores", like it or not. ** from ****
Review of Number One
